Is this sentence grammatically correct or not?

Question

Is this correct?

Such cooperation can prepare students to be good team players and understand the value of other people’s perspectives.

Or should it be "...players and to understand..."

Or would both versions be correct?

Thank you!

Answer 1

I believe both are ok, but I suggest inserting 'to' gives 'understanding' equal emphasis with being good team players.

Answer 2

"...prepare students ... to understand" doesn't really work. They prepared him to understand is grammatical but a strange idea. You really need to add another verb: "... can prepare students to be good team players and help them to understand" or "... and help them to see".

  can
       prepare students to be ...

  and

  (can)

       help them to ...

You can repeat or omit the second "can". The choice is a matter of style.

Answer 3

Such cooperation can prepare students to be good team players and understand the value of other people’s perspectives.

This is a matter of parallelism and elision.

You can look at it this way:

Such cooperation can prepare students to [be good team players] and [understand the value of other people’s perspectives].

If either one of either one of those phrases were missing and the to were removed, it would be ungrammatical:

✘ Such cooperation can prepare students understand the value of other people’s perspectives.

In the shorter sentence, the to is required:

✔ Such cooperation can prepare students to understand the value of other people’s perspectives.

But when we read the sentence with the conjunction and the to in front of both items, we mentally assign it to both of them:

✔ Such cooperation can prepare students to be good team players and [to] understand the value of other people’s perspectives.

As such, both versions are fine—either with the second to or without it. It's more natural to leave it out, but including it is by no means wrong—since it's implicitly there anyway.